The Hull Pixelbot is a small robot that was born in Hull. It carries pixels, so it is a pixelbot. It is designed to be simple to build, fun to play with and, above all, cheap to make. The chassis is made from 3D printed parts and the electronics and motors needed to get a robot up and running can be purchased for less than 10 pounds.
The robot motors are controlled by an Arduino Uno that uses funky timing code to allow it to move and react to sensors at the same time. The Arduino controller runs tiny scripting language called HullOS which allows users to write simple “Python-like” programs to control it.
By adding an ESP32 or ESP8266 to the robot you can control it via a network connection.
A number of robot users can simultaneously program and control their robots via a browser which is connected to a Azure server which distributes the code over MQTT connections.
We are presently working on robot tracking so that we can create “Robot Rugby” with teams creating programs to control their robot players.
These are our elite "Red Nose Robots" being drilled for the Rob Miles Lecture in Rhyme all about Pixelbots.
This is the robots being used to display pixel graphics.
You can find out more about the Hull Pixelbot project here.